If I were a jazzillionair one of the first things I would do for the arts is track down Gaelle Denis & offer to fund her at whatever it takes to get City Paradise (2004) turned into a feature film.

This little gem of a film is a work of unmitigated genius, at a scant six minutes it's one of the best, strangest, & most beautiful movies I've ever seen. Had it been feature length I couldn't possibly have gotten bored with it, but would been just as rivetted.

A combination live-action & animation, & mostly the latter, we see Tomoko (Hiroe Takei) arriving by airplane in London. When she's in the tube she asks directions to Picadilly. The helium voices of the characters are a hoot, & Tomoko's cutest of all.

She has geisha-white make up as she goes about London knock-kneed, rather than bowlegged like most Londoners.

In her rented flat, she unpacks her suitcase, one of the best unpacking scenes I've ever seen, I won't tell ya 'bout it, but will you be happy.

She checks out the pool, slips, cracks her head, falls in the water, is saved by a giant jelly fish that takes her down, down, down into the watery depths.

As the jellyfish passes by the windows of the passenger-filled tube, no one sees her inside the jellyfish, no one hears her sad-funny little cry for help.

But alls well that ends well, as the jellyfish soon dumps her in a dry area underneath London. This is the titular City Paradise, a secret world of alien singers & sparkler flowers.

There's quite a bit more built into this condensed adventure, & even the start of a relationship with a man who lives in her building, & I really truly intensely wanted to know more about how Tomoko's time in London would be spent.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl